


Sometime After

by acsullivan



Series: Same Old Gravel, Same Old Sickness [2]
Category: Captain America (Movies), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Artist Steve Rogers, Fix It, M/M, Not Avengers: Endgame (Movie) Compliant, Post-Avengers: Endgame (Movie), Soft Ending, Survivor Guilt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-10
Updated: 2019-07-10
Packaged: 2020-06-25 21:44:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,497
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19754371
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/acsullivan/pseuds/acsullivan
Summary: “I can do it, Buck.”“But you…you don’t have to.”He did. Of course he had to. The universe needed realignment, and existence always required a savior. But, hell, if on the seventh day God rested, couldn’t such a savior take his vacation just a little early?“Not now.”





	Sometime After

**Author's Note:**

> This isn't quite that original, nor it is exciting, but it's deserved. Thank you for the support on the first part, and apologies for the delay in part 2's completion.

“We’re here, Stevie.”

Just warmth.

“We’re staying.”

**_Morning – days later_ **

****

For many decades, Bucky had ceased being a bystander, so much so that he nearly forgot what it felt like. He’d been dubbed the Winter Soldier, the pinnacle of violent dehumanization and precision concentrated and released at the tip of a bullet, the slice of a jugular, the manufactured crash of a motorcycle into a classic American automobile, the strangulation of a billionaire’s wife. It’d earned him a sort of success that he’d done much to forget.

It was when he collided with Steve again, however, on a spring afternoon in 2014 that would’ve otherwise been of no consequence to a brain-made-hard drive, that he’d reprised his role. Became miniscule again. The epoch of Captain America, the latest Steve Rogers’ apogee, had dwarfed him during World War Two and did the same seventy years later. Hell, once he’d been to the museums, read the papers, watched the news, seen the documentaries, and taken the months to exist on his own terms, it was a life he appreciated. It was easier. It allotted space for penance.

Of course, there were those moments where Steve unlawfully tore Bucky from his cherished sidelines and placed him high on a shelf of Steve’s own making. In these moments he became alarmingly _not_ Captain America. And the drop to where Bucky thought he ought to dwell was dizzying at which to stare, but he did it anyway.

So while Steve burned and shredded bridges for him, Bucky kept trying to fall back to his rank, and when he realized Steve was now too strong both in spirit _and_ in literal physicality, Bucky froze himself into a familiar sleep.

Wakanda was spent in between roles. A bystander to the locals, a science experiment to Shuri, an object of rediscovered affection, sensuality, and disbelief to Steve, that secluded utopia jammed most of Bucky’s puzzle pieces back in place. Most of them. The important ones. The ones where he could remember Steve: nearly dying on expired December nights, drawing panoramas and intimate figures of James Buchanan Barnes (who he was, _would_ be, _had_ been, _could_ be…). The ones where Bucky could remember and feel and express what he’d fought to quell until the very moment his hands had slipped from that train.

The present, moreover, he reduced to a mystery.

The dust cleared to reveal a surplus of grief in the air. It was clashing with personalities who’d grown unfortunately accustomed to this sort of heartbreak yet, Bucky deduced, probably not of this magnitude.

He’d only dealt with Tony Stark by extension. A bloody, frayed cord had connected them for a long, long time, and this was certainly not the way Bucky pictured its severance. He’d seen the look in Stark’s eyes as he’d wielded the Gauntlet, the look of a man who was ready, a man who was through with tip-toeing the line, a man whose humanity was greater than most. Bucky knew the look and wondered, in an inconvenient lapse of memory, if he’d ever brandished it himself.

Probably not. He’d killed Tony’s parents. That told enough of a story.

Wilson found a throbbing, big chunk of his heart to share with Bucky during the funeral, and, in between bouts of humored criticism regarding his attire (Bucky’d been known back in Wakanda to possess very little), kept diligently at his side. Maybe a paid actor shuffled into place by Steve – who was trying and failing to remain as Captain America, it seemed, during the lamentation of his halfway friend but eternal ally – suddenly Wilson was a companion borne out of wartime hellfire. Those friends tended to stick around, and Bucky found it in him to reminisce about the webbing they’d found themselves mutually bound by just a few years prior. _Peter_ (he’d since gathered the culprit’s name) was a dolorous rubble of tears.

Bucky watched Captain America and waited for the moments wherein Steve Rogers poked through, his anticipation the only thing abating the anxiety of being surrounded by the universe’s most powerful beings, many of whom had never even considered giving him their trust (for good reason, Bucky conceded). He tried to be to them a bystander, too, but the irreparable debt he felt knocking on the outside of his ribs, teasing him for entrance like it had been since Siberia, prevented such. He knew carrying arrears and promises when the creditor was deceased was nothing easy. He knew it well.

Captain America became Steve when he and Bucky finally brushed elbows as the evening came to a close, when the yellow sun took its leave behind the legions of coniferous trees Stark had, no doubt, used to shelter his family from a life every person touched by S.H.I.E.L.D knew they couldn’t outrun. Steve picked at the hors d'oeuvres Bucky’d been handed at some point on an ovular plate because he knew Bucky wouldn’t eat them. They made small talk and oblique eye contact, long enough for Bucky to count the specks of exhaustion and words unable to be said – _yet,_ Bucky swore – in his irises.

And they stood lakeside, the slow dirge of departure humming nearby. Bucky wouldn’t push; he didn’t know how. He was following again, wanted to do so, wanted to find the jaws of death and maybe, somehow, actually follow Steve into them this time.

“I’ve been…talking with Banner,” he said into the horizon, not looking anywhere, really. Bucky stuffed his hands into the pockets of his jacket, twiddled with a loose thread or two along the inseam. Listening.

“Lots of, you know, _intricacies_ with the Stones. Things Stark would know.”

“Were there a lot of things he _didn’t_?”

Steve raised his brow at the contribution. “No, not really.” He dug his dress-shoed toe into the dirt.

“Realigning each timeline that the Stones came from. That’s next. Couldn’t get much out of him. Banner, I mean.” There was a ripple in the lake; Bucky heard Morgan Stark let out a whine somewhere to their left but didn’t bother calculating the distance at which they stood from the commotion.

“I…didn’t _want_ to. We shouldn’t be talking about all of this, not now, anyway.”

Bucky felt himself being called into play and hoped this was a small enough step. Not a leap onto the main stage, merely a hop onto a juncture he’d spent a childhood and a half tending to, that on which Steve performed.

“Then you should relax. You’re right. It’s not the time.”

“Or the place.”

Steve ran the first three fingers of his left hand through the top tufts of his hair, prompting Bucky’s line of sight to follow the movement as a pang for nicotine and the sound of old boat horns yawned in his ears.

“Hopping time doesn’t feel right, you know,” he went on. “Never felt stranger _anywhere_. Worse than basic. Worse than…”

“Prostituting for bond sales?” Bucky took a risk without contemplating the collateral.

And when Steve cracked a smile, Bucky thanked his reemerging intuition, welcomed it back from such a long repose.

“What, that’s what we’re calling it now?”

“I mean, the whole getup _was_ a little…exciting on the eyes.”

“Helmet was always a little too snug...”

“You can’t contain that nose of yours with _any_ thing, Rogers.”

Bucky remembered dancing away from puddles of halfway frozen water and shelling out a week and a half’s worth of wages to repair the source. This felt the same, twirling and tumbling away from the epicenter of something diseased and dangerous.

“It doesn’t gotta be you,” he uttered, before thinking better of it, before thinking at all.

“Then who else?”

There was no Captain America in that reply, however. Instead a smallness lingered, one that had been exclusive to Steve Rogers bedridden with pneumonia, Steve Rogers being rejected by the first, third, and umpteenth recruitment office, Steve Rogers freshly without a mother. There wasn’t defeat, no, but something much worse: a hapless struggle. Reaching for banal chance and fortune, the likes that befell every other resident of early 20th century Brooklyn, New York, except for the man with whom Bucky had found himself inexplicably intertwined.

It sent him back, repaired more synapses and refired old neurons faster and harder than Shuri’s fool-proof science ever had.

“I can do it, Buck.”

“But you…you don’t _have_ to.”

He did. Of _course_ he had to. The universe needed realignment, and existence always required a savior. But, hell, if on the seventh day God rested, couldn’t such a savior take _his_ vacation just a little early?

“Not now.”

Somewhere along the way Steve’s hand had found Bucky’s elbow. He played with the leather pad there, searched for a sticking point. Sometimes, ages ago, he and Bucky would fall asleep and wake up with their fingertips barely touching, a grazing, graceful thing Bucky’d never been sure if Steve knew about or not, an instance of time that grounded him in New York and in Italy. Yet there, then, he knew.

Everything was mutual, traveled two ways, never parallel, only colliding.

**_1942 – Hell [Italy]_ **

**_March 10, 23:49_ **

****

There was a cliffside tearing apart Bucky’s throat. Each note of speech, every yawn, even remote expression set the flames of infection alive in his mouth. He didn’t have much of a problem staying quiet, it really only irritated Dugan, who required constant dialogue when on watch and/or when feeling particularly anxious about the coming storm.

He hoped it wasn’t contagious. It was rare that illness rendered Bucky actually aware of his health above all the other life-threatening commotion, that which melted together into a chunky stream of discomfort he’d lived with since basic training. His knuckles, ankles, toes, jaw and neck ached. Each limb pulsated and throbbed. He felt the reverberations in his ribs.

Dugan entered loudly through the tent flaps, boots thundering with mud. On Bucky’s count, who only stirred because he hadn’t been asleep in the first place, it had been raining for six days straight. He wondered how the clouds had anymore to give and wished he could smell the petrichor through the snot and phlegm building up like a barricade in each nostril.

“Post. Halted a few days. Some fuckin’ clerical error.”

He tossed each letter and package encased with dirt and grime to their appropriate recipient, and Bucky scrounged up the sense to be surprised when a parcel nearly hit him square in the temple. He sat up, held his knees close to his chest, and turned the thing over in his hands, subsiding the ache for a moment or two.

It was Steve’s handwriting, in pen, no less, a medium he rarely frequented. Half the address line was smudged away due to their general climate and manhandling, but there wasn’t the time nor the capability to voice a complaint to Dugan, who Bucky knew was watching as he tore into the package like a ravenous stray.

A fresh lighter, a pack of cigarettes from Bruce’s, the kind from the highest shelf Steve hadn’t even been able to reach, let alone afford, four individually wrapped chocolate squares, and an envelope as thick as Bucky’s thumb. Coughing harshly into his elbow, he contemplated what to devour first before understanding why the trove was sitting in his lap in the first place.

A birthday. Bucky was twenty-five. He’d been around for twenty-five rotations. Seen a thousand sunsets.

Of course Steve remembered. He’d been silent for a while, and when he did write, the postal delay was almost as painful as the brevity with which he penned. That envelope, however, tempted Bucky into thinking Steve had made up for his sort of absence, and it wasn’t like Bucky took much time to reciprocate the communicative effort. This pen-and-paper correspondence drilled him with a foreign pain; he hadn’t learned how to contain and control it yet.

“Jesus fuckin’ Christ, Barnes. The fuck kinda dame you got back home?”

He went for the envelope first, foolishly not taking half a second to stuff his cigarettes underneath his pillow from his tentmates’ watchful, kleptomaniac eyes.

“A swell one,” Bucky managed, sliding his finger beneath the sticky paper lip, suddenly feeling evocative. “Big nose, blue watery eyes with… _long_ , bright hair” It tore easy, was already damp from the torrents of rain, but the contents remained safe inside.

“You best hide those smokes,” Dugan warned again, eager for conversation. Bucky was too distracted to _not_ indulge him. “You know these fuckers’ll steal ‘em from right under your goddamn nose…”

“Come and open the fuckin’ package,” Bucky droned, swimming in Steven Grant Rogers’ script. “Take one, if it’ll stop you from blabbering.”

Dugan, shocked into silence for the first time in the history of the 107th, nearly dropped the box once Bucky tossed it to him and took his sweet time and delicacy in undoing the wrap from around each corner. Chuckling and marveling at the way Steve dipped the curves of his p’s and q’s held Bucky over for long enough.

_Bucky -_

_I haven’t written in a while and I’m real sorry. They got me doing loads of “domestic policy” work back home. That’s what they tell me to call it. They also tell me not to share it with anyone. So I can’t tell you much, even when I want to, (and I do want to) but every day I didn’t write meant I didn’t get a letter from you. And I don’t want to end up like the moms and wives and daughters and sisters. (Do you think the dads cry too? And the brothers? They don’t show them. Probably because they’re all with you killing Nazis.)_

_First thing’s first – happy birthday pal. I think I got the postal delay time down good enough. Hopefully this reaches you around the 10 th. 25? You’re getting old. Officially. And chocolate and nicotine is the closest I could get to blowing out any candles._

_Don’t worry about the money. I know the first thing you saw was the cigarettes from the top shelf of Bruce’s. They got me in Jersey now – should I be telling you that? Probably not – and they’re a little cheaper here. Probably the one good thing about being south. It smells rotten, just like how you smelled coming back from the docks._

_Do you have the time to read these? I hope so. I don’t know when I’ll write again and I sure as hell don’t know when you will. Even though your penmanship got worse thank you for answering. I keep them. All of them. I don’t think neither of us are suited for letter writing but I’ll take what we can get._

_I’m fine. I feel great. Really. One of these days I’ll tell you about all this but I want to hear your stories first._

_P.S. Keep the drawings, if you can. I don’t care if they get battered and bruised; Lord knows you are._

_Best -_

_Steve_

Beneath the letter were, as promised, a slew of torn notebook pages filled with the pencil lead Steve used to rub accidentally into the pores of his cheeks. Shiny grey lines and strokes Bucky wished Steve would never stop creating, as fine as feathers in his hands. Landscapes of Jersey – was he near Newport? – flowers, random passersby, and Bucky dressed as those faraway movie stars bringing up the rear.

Bucky saved the chocolate, assuming he wouldn’t be able to taste it much with his nose so clogged. The food he used to make Steve when he was lumbered with such illness, enormously worse than this bug, no doubt, must’ve tasted so foul on his diseased tongue.

“It’s my birthday,” he announced. The verbiage sent another volley of coughs rattling through his chest, shaking his lungs. Painfully aware of his vitality, aware of his age and the needle he’d been dancing on lately, Bucky thought Dugan should know.

“Dame must be smart then,” Dugan remarked, puffing languidly the cigarette he’d swiped. “If she managed to get that sent to you on the right date. Or just fucking lucky.”

James-Buchanan-Barnes-made-Clark-Gable stared up at a current battered and bruised Bucky with such hope it made one nauseous to stare too long. There was a glint of earnest, youth, and optimism in the eyes that only Steve could put there and make convincing. If it had ever dwelled in his _real_ eyes, if Bucky had ever been that happy, surely it’d been killed off.

But that was okay. Steve didn’t know of its death yet. He never would, either. Bucky was twenty-five now and would make sure of it. If Steve still drew and breathed and believed in the movies, he wasn’t fit for this. Bucky didn’t _want_ him in this. War would spoil the picture-perfect love Steve sent him from miles and miles away, a thing to keep getting fucking drunk on, until some German learned to shoot better than Bucky and put one between his eyes.

“She’s both,” Bucky resolved. “And I’m lucky to have her.”

**_Present Day (2023)_ **

**_New York, New York_ **

**_07:31_ **

****

There wasn’t space here. Not for the moment in time they both needed. There were holes that needed repaired, reunions still to be had, and the longer Bucky looked at the New York skyline the more his heart became a muddy mess of a long-gone childhood and all the years of nauseating tragedy since.

They convened in a hallway in the midst of administrative folks and confused, post-apocalypse reincarnations wandering their old center of business. Lips to his temples, Bucky said they’d meet _here_. Fingers dancing along the back of his neck, leaving chills in their wake, Steve promised he’d find it in three days’ time.

Five years dripped into irrelevancy. Everything remained mutual, kept travelling two ways, never parallel, only ever colliding.

**_Present Day (2023)_ **

**_Newport, New Jersey_ **

**_04:13_ **

****

“There is no beginning, no middle, no end, no suspense, no moral, no causes, no effects.”

-Kurt Vonnegut, _Slaughterhouse-Five_ (1969)

Bucky read that at some point or another during his period of recollection 2016, when he shielded himself inside a safehouse once lent to him and then abandoned by Hydra, when they still had their fingers round his throat. He read books about war and hated that he only understood them as a lived-experience, that, often times, their artistic individuality was lost to him on account of the pictures they painted being too real and potent, even seventy years later.

But that quote appeared to him, spelled out in a ghostly haze just above his field of vision, on a morning in early May when the safehouse door in Newport, New Jersey (of all God-forsaken places) gave a ferocious lurch.

He awoke slick with sweat. It dripped down the divot between his shoulder blades and made a puddle where his forehead had been buried into the aging cotton pillowcase. Fumbling and blinking away the white flashes from behind his eyes, the howls of air raids made screams by a nightmare he’d thought was lost to the ice, Bucky scrambled toward the source of the noise.

Bucky reached deep under the mattress, which he’d stationed in the only corner of the one roomed apartment that wasn’t surrounded with yellowing windows, to feel the ridged hilt of his knife. He flicked it instinctively in his hand and marched slowly, cautious, waiting for the commotion to die, but the dream wouldn’t shake. He’d definitely heard the gurgle of blood inside a shredded throat before, must’ve seen a head blown up and off its body, left to rot. God, that fucking _whistling_ , the sound the explosives made just before impact, just before the ground beneath you shook and seemed to rattle its own graves, produce its own bones, its own sinew and ichor…

Bucky dropped the knife once he reached the door, his palm too slick and clammy to maintain a grip. He stopped the intruder mid-thud, flung the door completely open, leaning on the knob for support. He waited for the whistling to stop.

“Buck.”

Silence befell Bucky. He looked to his feet. They weren’t singed with ash; they didn’t smoke. He didn’t crunch the bones of those before him nor dodge the bloated, dead flesh of his yesterday friends. It was just moldy linoleum.

“Hey.”

Bucky was reminded of his green-tinted rescue in 1943, where confusion was abundant, but love was bigger, stronger, faster, absolutely irresistible. He’d stared up at cornflower eyes and a sideways nose with more adoration than a human being should ever be capable of feeling.

Steve stuck that nose right in the crook of Bucky’s neck, the space between his shoulder and collarbone that was still damp, and in a slew of haphazard backwards steps made it inside, the door shut loudly behind them. He smelled clean, felt warm and dew-touched and sturdier than ever.

“You’re in Jersey,” Steve reminded him, pressing foreheads, breathing when he was capable, hands clambering and searching.

“Crazy, huh?”

Bucky’s fingers found Steve’s chest and tried to soothe the speed with which it rose and fell. Slowly his jacket shed from his arms, a clean thing dropped onto the filth of an old life.

“It smells, right?” He put an inch between them, looked at every single hair on Bucky’s chin that needed shaving. “Like I said?”

Bucky didn’t know how to convey that he was in the midst of a sensory overload, that nothing Steve could describe would have much clarity, apart from the feeling of his heated, electric skin along the pads of Bucky’s fingers. He couldn’t stop touching. There was too much there, too much to behold at once, let alone in the confines of privacy, the likes of which they’d been deprived of for so long.

But, maybe, Bucky contemplated, the warmth of Steve’s breath wasn’t lost on him, the way it swayed and floated and dissipated around his cheeks, tempted the eyes. Bucky moved his hands near the source of the heat, eyelids halfway shut, feeling pores and ridges and a bone structure he’d come to memorize in his own special way a lifetime ago. He didn’t require pencils, merely touch.

Steve borrowed a page or two out of _his_ book, it seemed. He closed the barely-there gap between them both in one smooth, almost clandestine motion, running lips together as easily as conversation yet as sacred as all the goddamn time that’d passed since the last. It was so gentle Bucky thought he might fall over and parted so slowly that the impression of Steve lingered, a ghost abruptly palpable.

“Y’ smell fine,” Bucky managed, somehow, thinking he was smiling, hoping he remembered how. “Smell just fine to me.”

Suddenly Steve put a note of distance between them. He held onto Bucky’s neck and looked around, taking the scenery in, resuming the exhaustive pace at which his ribs were rising and falling.

“It’s been…” he tried, and failed, and tried again. “It’s been…forever.”

Bucky was quick to agree, but even quicker to recant, sympathetic agony taking hold of his sense of chronology. It had only been a few days for Bucky. They’d gone longer between visits to Wakanda. They’d gone the whole war. Why did this minutia of time hurt so badly?

What the hell happens in five years, really?

“Yeah. It has,” he whispered, noticing slowly the increased weight of Steve on his shoulders. He could feel his trembling through his own extremities and watched as shadows passed through, not over, his eyes.

“I’ve gotta…I’ve gotta go. Soon. They’re not here. So I gotta…”

Bucky would let Steve leave him a hundred and one times over if it meant coming back again. But he resisted this guilt-ridden, austere pledge to leave now, to fall on his sword again. He wouldn’t make it back. There were tangible cracks in the armor now, those which grief, extended, leaves behind. Steve wasn’t used to it; he’d been born with impossibly thick skin, and it seemed like it took one-hundred and five years to finally chip it down raw. A superhero’s feat all its own.

“You can’t. Not right now.”

Sweat beaded along his brow. Bucky knew it was cold. Steve was balancing along the edge, someplace high, almost out of reach, and the breeze up there was chilly.

“It shouldn’t…it shouldn’t’ve been them. Tony, Natasha. What the…what the hell was I even _there_ for?”

Bucky missed a shot during his time in the 107th and it saved a man’s life. During an infiltration, had he landed the bullet, he would’ve erupted a line of explosives hiding just out of sight and ended them all, right then and there. Another time he’d made a shot, been ordered to, and it alerted the enemy. A man he’d spent weeks sleeping next to had just shown Bucky a small, pocket-sized photo of his newborn daughter that morning with a darkened, amiss expression on his face, and a German slit his throat because Bucky did what the war machine said to.

There was no role to play. There were no right or wrongs. No morals, no choices. It happened. Happens. Presently. Currently. Will happen in the future.

Steve drew in black and white pencil. He saw the world in the hues he crafted and had never fashioned a shade for chance catastrophes. But that grey which he so sorely lacked had been around him for years, suffocating him in the Brooklyn air, inside the crevices of his cheeks, wrapping him tight in United States’ Army-issued clothing. He was just too damn bright to see it.

“You know better than I do that there’s no order to this,” Bucky said, fiddling delicately with the turn of Steve Rogers’ jaw, an angle no artist could ever copy.

“I can’t…can’t accept that…”

The moldy linoleum didn’t stand a chance in hell at infecting Steve’s feet. The soles of his shoes could’ve left sunspots in their wake and Bucky just would’ve accepted it, welcomed the holes seared into his retinas.

“You’ve spent all this time tryin’ to get me past what…what _I_ did.” The mattress gave a long screech of old springs once Steve’s form was lowered, folding, onto it. Bucky took up the space between his knees, crouched there, remembering how human proximity used to pull him out of these moments.

“I was the one who _took_. I took, took, and took. And you’ve always been the one to _give_. You’ve given more than…more than anyone really _has_ , Stevie.”

The sinew of his throat tightened and burned and squeezed around that old nickname. Moisture pricked the corners of his eyes. Battlefield dust.

“You deserve to take a minute. A breather. Jesus, take two.”

Steve clenched his fingers around the frayed sheets and Bucky watched simultaneously as his lips moved and became the same color of pale, ghostly skin round his knuckles. Guilt was rising like tide, threatening to demolish. Bucky didn’t know how to abate it, had never succeeded in doing so himself, but he’d been talked down from plenty a ledge, and then some. He could improvise.

“You would’ve done it, too. If you’d been them,” Bucky assured, taking pleasure in assuring Steve of the greatness he bled, smelled of, sounded, and tasted like.

“It’s all random. There’s no order. Tony knew it, Natasha knew it. They put their lives down because the moment called for it.”

Bucky remembered shooting Germans in the throat when they crept up close behind Steve because the moment called for it and dragging him out of harm’s way because he was calling for that same moment to leave. Death, which came in milliseconds, had been evaded by Steve so many times.

“God, you’ve had a hundred _moments_.”

“Then so have you,” Steve murmured, easing up some of the tension in his knees, overtop of which Bucky had splayed his hands. “A thousand, easy.”

“Most of those were…” he stopped himself from saying “my fault,” knowing precisely where it would get him but sensing the scalding waters of self-deprecation and guilt, a pleasant, customary pain.

“Those were different. I can’t be as selfless as you,” he corrected, inching intent fingers further up the firm, knotted muscle of Steve’s thighs, which didn’t quiver in the slightest. “Hell, no one can.”

“The moment called for it,” Steve resolved, going a shade darker in the face. “The moment called for…for you.”

A culpable, cheeky smile overpassed Steve’s features, contorting his tired eyes in a very 1939 kind of way, so much so that Bucky longed for a photograph comparison.

“I’ve been selfish. I think of you. Thought of you. Just you. I thought of…of what would happen if I screwed up _again_ …I keep leavin’ you out to dry, Buck. In the goddamn _moment_ it’s…it’s always for you.”

The admitted devotion of the United States’ greatest defender was not something any meager World War Two veteran made international assassin made recuperated ally was able to handle. Bucky’s hands, which had been squeezing and massaging seconds prior, fell limp. His squatted posture faltered.

“And you’re gonna tell me that Stark and Nat were the same?” Steve posed, feigning dramatics between oddly similar pricks of moisture dotting the folds of his eyelids. “Nah. They had the whole of humanity on their mind. My ‘whole’ was just you. No matter how much I tried to convince myself that it was bigger than you, than that, I…I couldn’t.”

He was pulling the words of sympathy and encouragement from Bucky’s lips and spinning them into something so sentimental it made Bucky’s stomach toss and turn. Nothing had changed in one hundred and five years.

“I’ve gotten selfish. Unkind. Hell, _greedy_. I needed you. I thought, maybe, you know, I could go back, once this was over. Go back to where I’m supposed to be these days, given my age.” He swallowed a grin, a sad expression that walked on feeble legs. “But I just got so tired of all this…this _mess._ I…fuck, I needed…”

On his knees now, Bucky was there to catch the drooped head of Steve Rogers in the crook of his neck, eyes wide and unblinking.

“That’s why I gotta go. I gotta fix it, and then I can be done. I can be through with it. And you and me can…”

Steve Rogers was reaching out to Bucky again on that train. The humid breeze of downtown Jersey felt as chilled as the subzero mountain air. Bucky’s fingers were slipping and sliding, but Steve was bright and trying his damn hardest to be there. He was screaming and crying and begging a God he’d been taught, at some point, to believe in to deliver, just this once, a dose of luck, probably not expecting it to come over a century later.

Bucky wasn’t going to fall again, and he wasn’t going to let such luck go unnoticed, not in this time of need.

“Listen, please” he managed, creating a beat of space between them. “You never fuckin’ listen, Rogers. Jesus Christ.”

Steve laughed. Bucky wanted to weep.

“If I’m _it_ , if you’re tellin’ me your dumb ass thinks I’m as good as this world gets for the one and only Steven Grant Captain America Rogers, then, for one thing, you have a _lousy_ taste in humanity.”

At some point or other, they both fell into a fit of tearful giggles.

“But if that really is the case: be selfish for me. The world’s asking you too. It may not deserve it, but it _wants_ it. The ‘world’ wants _you_.”

The world had been pining and begging for and dreaming and thinking of and cherishing and loving Steven Grant Rogers for ages.

“I think…I think I can indulge that.”

Bucky wasn’t falling off a train anymore. The invisible hand of Time, God, or even Fate herself was reaching and pulling him up from the wreckage. And when he surfaced, Steve was there to pull some more, until they were one.

**_Present Day (2023)_ **

**_Newport, New Jersey_ **

**_07:58_ **

****

“I love you. I’m in love with you. I’ve had it _bad_. It made me sick. Years ‘n years.”

Steve moved overtop Bucky slowly but surely, body curved to form a slice of the moon, and suddenly Bucky just couldn’t shut up about it. Words and confessions way past their expiration date were bubbling to the surface.

“Tell me again,” Steve pleaded, meaning it. Needing it.

“I love you. I love you, Stevie.”

He surrendered his mouth for another moment to whom he was addressing, breathing scarcely.

“We both had it bad,” he whispered, an eyelash away. “Nasty bug, innit?”

“You made me sick every day. I’d do it all again,” Bucky combatted.

“Don’t go straining yourself.”

Bucky shifted testily beneath Steve, earning a groan, a roll of the head, the eyes, the whole love-drunken form of him.

“I love you too, Buck.”

**Author's Note:**

> All the Pretty Girls by KALEO has captured my heart; I suggest giving it a listen after reading any of your favorite Steve/Bucky stories.


End file.
